Author : Juan Felipe Herrera, Illustrator : Anita DeLucio-Brock
1st Grade - 4th Grade

Los meros meros remateros - Grandma and Me at the Flea

Los meros meros remateros - Grandma and Me at the Flea, Hardcover, Bilingual, Book, Juan Felipe Herrera, Anita DeLucio-Brock, 1st Grade - 4th Grade, 9780892391714, $16.95

$401.40 for the Bilingual Collection Red Books Set , Including 20%-Off, Free Shipping, and No Sales Tax : 16 Hardcover Bilingual Books and 29 Softcover Bilingual Books

Every Sunday Juanito helps his grandmother sell old clothes at the remate, the flea market. The sun sparkles over the rainbow-colored tents, Juanito and his friends fulfill Grandma's vision of the flea as a sharing community of friendly give-and-take as they romp from booth to booth.

Juanito gallops to the jewelry-man, who gives Juanito a copper bracelet and a watch with big numbers for Grandma to help send money orders home to Mexico. He zooms over to Señora Vela, who gratefully accepts a bundle of Grandma's healing herbs in return for sacks of ruby red chiles. With every exchange he learns firsthand what it means to be a true rematero - a fleamarketeer - and understands that the value of community can never be measured in dollars.

Award-winning Mexican American author Juan Felipe Herrera brings his boyhood memories of the remate to life with his lively bilingual prose, and Anita De Lucio-Brock's vibrant artwork draws us in to the warm, caring world of the flea market. Together these artists show - beautifully - what it means to give and to receive.

Teacher's Guide

Listen to Vienna Rose read Grandma and Me at the Flea to you.  A marvelous example of the magical encounter between a child and books that we wish for all children.

Poet Herrera "offers up a slice of autobiography in an inviting bilingual picture book. Anita De Lucio Brock's colorful illustrations, inspired by Mexican folk art, are well suited to the story. . . As the story proceeds, it becomes clear that Grandma is . . . an integral member of the community-in fact, she embodies the generosity and support that bind it together . . . The problems answered by thoughtful gestures and gifts at Herrera's flea market are those of people working hard but still living in poverty . . . But in this community, as in others, what makes the difference is hope. Fittingly, the remate is held on the former grounds of the Esperanza Gardens Drive-In Theater. And Esperanza-the Spanish word for hope-;is Grandma's given name."      —Riverbank Review

"As brightly colored as an Oaxacan carving, this sweet bilingual book pays homage to the flea markets (remates) that Herrera grew up with in California's San Juaquin Valley."
     —USA Today

Publishers Weekly : Collecting churros, chiles and healing herbs, a Mexican-American boy bounds from booth to booth visiting fellow flea market vendors in Grandma and Me at the Flea or Los Meros Meros Remateros by Juan Felipe Herrera, illus. by Anita DeLucio-Brock. Evoking the feel of folk art, DeLucio-Brock's full-bleed illustrations form a colorful backdrop for side-by-side Spanish and English text.

Booklist : Ages 4-8. Juanito doesn't mind getting up at five o'clock on Sunday mornings. That's when he and Grandma Esperanza drive to the open-air flea market where, over the years, they have sold wares, and Esperanza has guided and translated for new immigrants and offered recipes, poems, comfort, and massages to tired workers. As Juanito runs happily through the stalls with his friends, the vendors repay Esperanza's kindnesses with gifts of their own--belts, fruit, jewelry, blankets--which Juanito offers to Esperanza at the story's end. The overt messages about giving, receiving, and reuse (there's no money exchanged) are balanced by the lyrical bilingual text (both languages on each spread) that celebrates the energy and warmth of the "soft city of tents and woolly walls." The parrot-colored paintings are somewhat amateurish in their rendering of people, but their folk-art details--the smiling suns and vibrantly patterned blankets--add appeal. A sunny glimpse of a Hispanic community.

"The overt messages about giving, receiving, and reuse (there's no money exchanged) are balanced by the lyrical bilingual text (both languages on each spread) that celebrates the energy and warmth of the "soft city of tents and woolly walls."
     —Booklist Magazine

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